I come from a wintry, flinty, and hilly place called the Ozarks, where limestone runs in deep, moon-gray seams and ridges. Moving to Mississippi in 1998 was thrilling—pine trees, bamboo, gardenias, anoles, flying cockroaches, soil that shifted, skies roiling with Gulf moisture. You could throw a thought on the ground, and it would grow, in November!
For a would-be writer, though, Mississippi was both warmly welcoming and culturally intimidating. I came from a writing program at the University of Arkansas, but something left over of hill country reticence made Mississippi a challenge. Everyone in Mississippi made a living as a writer it seemed! And no one hesitated for a second to make introductions such as “Hi, I’m Jane, and I write the culinary murder mystery series.” “This is Rocky, and he writes about southern cryptozoology.” “Name’s Chuck. Got this novel about a preaching, healing banana from Bovina. Cohen Bros. are after it for a movie.”
Where I grew up in Springfield, Missouri, you would never introduce yourself as a writer to anyone unless you had the product there in hand to sell that instant. Announcing you were a writer out of context, or without the reputation of Janet Dailey, the only writer we all knew, marked you as wicked and weird, and certainly unemployable. “Hi, I’m Steve. I catch and roast bluebirds for a living. Like yours with mustard?”
You see, though we are risen from hillbillies, we are also the nation’s master homogenizers and native country to the world’s best sales force. Don’t believe me? Where did Sam Walton, of the Arkansas Ozarks, launch his first Sam’s Club and engender his Wal-Mart empire? Springfield, Missouri. Where does Bass Pro Shops come from? Well it started in a liquor store in, you guessed it, Springfield, Missouri. Where does the smoothest sales barker of all time originate from? Bob Barker of The Price is Right hails from Springfield, Missouri, even graduated from my wife’s alma mater, now Drury University.
Writing is not an homogenizing act. It defies and betrays empires. It prefers love to lucre. So, unless you have the product to prove it, keep smiling, keep listening, and keep that Ace close to the vest. At least that was the wise thing to do where I came from.
How was I to fit in Mississippi, home or native ground to William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, Elizabeth Spencer, Ellen Douglas, Ellen Gilchrist, Barry Hannah, James Whitehead, Larry Brown, Steve Yarbrough, Brad Watson, Donna Tartt and more? Possibly only Ireland revered and honored its writers with the intensity and warmth I saw in Mississippi. It was a reverence both heartwarming and stifling.
One of the first books I had the privilege to promote at University Press of Mississippi was Willie Morris’s North Toward Home. And, in the slough of despond as a writer with an unpublished novel manuscript awash in a sea of comfortable writers, I was sinking as I read Willie’s majestic autobiography. In Mississippi, even the nonfiction sang like a sword was in the attic! All was hopeless, nothing unusual, nothing with spark came from Springfield, Missouri.
And then I read that great, kind-hearted, ever-welcoming man’s invitation to live, breathe, and write in this amazing place. Right there in North Toward Home, the opening of chapter five in the Mississippi section, Willie writes: “A few weeks later, as a kind of consolation prize against death, I got the most unusual dog I ever owned, shipped from a kennel all the way from Springfield, Missouri.”
I read it out loud ten times. Skip came from Springfield, my native place, my hometown!
It was like Willie put his arm around Bob Barker’s shoulder, mussed the slick salesman’s silver hair, and they both shouted, “Come on down!” I still might not tell anyone I’m a writer unless I have a book in hand, which thanks to the intercession of St. John Evangelist and Moon City Press back in my Ozarks, I do! But listen, thanks to Willie, thanks to Skip, and a lot of other kind, welcoming hearts, I’m going to be all right here in Mississippi.
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Portions of Steve Yates’s novel Morkan’s Quarry appeared in Missouri Review, Ontario Review, and South Carolina Review. A novella-length excerpt was a finalist in the Faulkner Society’s Faulkner/Wisdom Novella Prize. His short stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Southwest Review, Turnstile, Texas Review, Louisiana Literature, and many other places. He is twice the recipient of individual artist’s fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission. He is assistant director / marketing director at University Press of Mississippi in Jackson when he is not leading a secret life … as a writer.
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